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History’s Most Catastrophic Man-made Errors

Khalid Elhassan December 9, 2020 34 min

Wanggongchang Explosion - Beijing — The Wanggongchang Explosion devastated Beijing. Pintrest

32. Dam Built to Withstand a “1000 Year Flood” Collapses After Getting Hit With a Flood Twice as Bad as the Worst Expectations

Chinese propaganda poster extolling The Great Leap Forward. Chinese Posters

In the 1950s, Mao Zedong announced The Great Leap Forward, an ambitious modernization program to transform China from a peasant society into a global power. As part of that program, the Chinese, with the help of Soviet experts, built a series of dams with the goal of retaining water and providing hydroelectric water. Little emphasis was put on flood control. A chief engineer blew the whistle on the danger, but he was ignored, accused of lacking communist zeal, and banished to the back of beyond.

One of the newly-built dams was at Banqiao, on the Ru River in Henan. 387 feet high, it had a storage capacity of 17.4 billion cubic feet. It was designed to withstand “a 1000-year flood”, that is a flood so severe the odds were that it would happen only once in a millennium. Unfortunately, in early August, 1975, Typhoon Nina struck, stalled over the Banqiao Dam area, and produced flooding double the anticipated 1000-year-level maximum.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.